MsProudSooner
03-16-2006, 07:15 PM
March 16, 2006, 7:20 PM ET
OU has come a long way from days of disbandment
By Mechelle Voepel
Special to ESPN.com
Oklahoma's women got through the Big 12 season and the league tournament unscathed. They enter the NCAA Tournament as a No. 2 seed, full of optimism and joy and warmly cloaked in camaraderie.
There are not many feelings quite like this that athletes experience. In fact, only the most fortunate ones do: When they have a really good team, everyone gets along and there don't seem any limits on what they can get done.
When they can't wait to play -- but they also don't want the days to go by too quickly, because they sense how amazing and rare a time this is.
And, maybe, they even know deep down that some day they'll be sitting in their car in gridlocked traffic, or it will be the blue day after Christmas, or they'll be wondering why their teenager won't talk to them … and they'll think back to a long-ago March, and shots made, rebounds snared, the help that came on defense, entire conversations taking place in two-second eye contact, hugs in the locker room.
You might think there is no time better than this for an athlete. And for some, there certainly isn't.
But Stacy Hansmeyer, who lived it as a senior forward for UConn in 1999-2000, said there is something she has enjoyed even more: Watching other kids experience it.
"Honestly, it is a great thing going through it as a player -- but it is the best feeling in the world to sit back and watch it as a coach," said Hansmeyer, in her fifth season as an assistant to Sherri Coale at Oklahoma. "I love these players and how hard they work. I love what Courtney Paris has done -- how her energy and passion have inspired everybody. They walk around with a lot of swagger and confidence."
Some athletes "wear" both of those traits better than others. In the case of UConn's and OU's women's basketball players, they wear them well. That's a reflection of their coaches, Coale and Geno Auriemma, who love the limelight and know how good they look in it -- yet both are so aware of the history of this sport and appreciate how far it has come.
Coale and Auriemma share a lot of traits, but what I appreciate more than any is that they both have a boatload of common sense and reality-based work ethic. When Auriemma got the UConn job in 1985, there was absolutely nothing to suggest it was a budding dynasty waiting for a ruler. He made it into that.
Freshman Courtney Paris has helped Oklahoma to the No. 2 seed in San Antonio.
Similarly, Coale symbolically was handed the keys to an empty tenement and told, "Good luck. Hope you can turn it into a real 'home' that somebody will care about."
It's interesting that Hansmeyer is one of the links between the two. She was one of Coale's top players at Norman High in Oklahoma. Had she been five years younger, she might have ended up playing for the Sooners.
But at the time she was being recruited by UConn, OU was just a few years past the monumentally wrong-headed decision by that school to get rid of women's basketball following the 1989-90 season because it was considered not worth the expense since "no one cared."
When the Sooners went to the Final Four in 2002, that bleak time was revisited by the media. And certainly, OU is long, long past those days now. Yet I don't think it should be permanently tossed into the bin of "that's ancient history and not relevant anymore."
Because it's one of the great lessons in women's collegiate basketball: How the right people dedicated to the right thing can make something great out of what literally -- for eight days -- had ceased to exist.
If you're familiar with the story, you know that OU's attendance was next-to-nothing -- even by the worst of women's hoops standards -- and the governor made his remark about how maybe the players could sell cookies to keep the team and how the reaction by a significant portion of OU alumni was, "Where are we eating after the spring football game?"
However, plenty of people did realize the decision couldn't have made less sense for many reasons -- not the least of which was that Oklahoma was then and still is home to so many good girls' basketball players. To even consider taking away the Division I women's basketball program from the state's signature university -- no offense to Oklahoma State or Tulsa or anybody else -- was unbelievable.
Consider these Oklahoma kids who graduated from high school in the 1989-92 time period and went onto collegiate success: Stephanie Bloomer (Arkansas '95), Andrea Harmon (Iowa '94), Shelley Jarrard (Vanderbilt '93), Katura "Tootie" Jones (Notre Dame '94) and Crystal Robinson (Southeast Oklahoma State '96). Harmon and Jarrard competed in the same Final Four, in 1993. Robinson is still playing in the WNBA.
This is not to say that had OU had its act together in those days, any of those players -- or others I haven't listed or Hansmeyer, who graduated from high school in 1996 -- would have ended up as Sooners. But the odds almost certainly would have been better.
Even as it was, Oklahoma kids from that time period, such as Angi Guffy, Etta Maytubby and Mandy Wade did come play for the Sooners. All of them scored more than 1,000 points in their careers.
The ultimate point is, Oklahoma has a long tradition of girls' and women's basketball, including the six-on-six kind that was being played in states such as Oklahoma, Iowa and Tennessee in times when girls in most states had virtually no organized basketball opportunities. The idea of OU dropping women's basketball was beyond absurd.
Yet it happened -- until a ruckus was made in the following week-plus to make school officials realize they had to do a quick resurrection.
Hansmeyer was just a 12-year-old kid then, and didn't entirely grasp the situation. But she did have some understanding of what took place.
"I think a lot of people in Oklahoma were devastated, but the fight that they undertook to keep it was incredible," Hansmeyer said. "It's amazing thinking that was the case then -- and look at it now."
Hansmeyer became an "adopted" member of the Nutmeg State when she was at UConn, and Huskies fans never forget their girls. But at heart, Hansmeyer belongs to her home state, Oklahoma. She's a native -- so are Coale and assistant coach Jan Ross and players Erin Higgins, Britney Brown, Laura Andrews, Kendra Moore and Carolyn Winchester.
They're also very happy to have Texans Leah Rush, Chelsi Welch and Antoinette Wadsworth, New Mexico's Beky Preston and, of course, those twins from California: Courtney and Ashley Paris.
Hansmeyer was a major factor in recruiting the Paris sisters, who say they've found Oklahoma an easy place to feel like home. To those for whom it truly is "home," these are the best of days.
At the Big 12 tournament in Dallas, Hansmeyer looked around Reunion Arena and thought about what it is to be a part of this Sooners team now.
"One thing that I love so much -- when I looked up in the stands, there were a lot of my old high school teammates and former OU players, and friends and family," she said. "That's what makes it so special."
Mechelle Voepel of The Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. She can be reached at mvoepel123@yahoo.com.
OU has come a long way from days of disbandment
By Mechelle Voepel
Special to ESPN.com
Oklahoma's women got through the Big 12 season and the league tournament unscathed. They enter the NCAA Tournament as a No. 2 seed, full of optimism and joy and warmly cloaked in camaraderie.
There are not many feelings quite like this that athletes experience. In fact, only the most fortunate ones do: When they have a really good team, everyone gets along and there don't seem any limits on what they can get done.
When they can't wait to play -- but they also don't want the days to go by too quickly, because they sense how amazing and rare a time this is.
And, maybe, they even know deep down that some day they'll be sitting in their car in gridlocked traffic, or it will be the blue day after Christmas, or they'll be wondering why their teenager won't talk to them … and they'll think back to a long-ago March, and shots made, rebounds snared, the help that came on defense, entire conversations taking place in two-second eye contact, hugs in the locker room.
You might think there is no time better than this for an athlete. And for some, there certainly isn't.
But Stacy Hansmeyer, who lived it as a senior forward for UConn in 1999-2000, said there is something she has enjoyed even more: Watching other kids experience it.
"Honestly, it is a great thing going through it as a player -- but it is the best feeling in the world to sit back and watch it as a coach," said Hansmeyer, in her fifth season as an assistant to Sherri Coale at Oklahoma. "I love these players and how hard they work. I love what Courtney Paris has done -- how her energy and passion have inspired everybody. They walk around with a lot of swagger and confidence."
Some athletes "wear" both of those traits better than others. In the case of UConn's and OU's women's basketball players, they wear them well. That's a reflection of their coaches, Coale and Geno Auriemma, who love the limelight and know how good they look in it -- yet both are so aware of the history of this sport and appreciate how far it has come.
Coale and Auriemma share a lot of traits, but what I appreciate more than any is that they both have a boatload of common sense and reality-based work ethic. When Auriemma got the UConn job in 1985, there was absolutely nothing to suggest it was a budding dynasty waiting for a ruler. He made it into that.
Freshman Courtney Paris has helped Oklahoma to the No. 2 seed in San Antonio.
Similarly, Coale symbolically was handed the keys to an empty tenement and told, "Good luck. Hope you can turn it into a real 'home' that somebody will care about."
It's interesting that Hansmeyer is one of the links between the two. She was one of Coale's top players at Norman High in Oklahoma. Had she been five years younger, she might have ended up playing for the Sooners.
But at the time she was being recruited by UConn, OU was just a few years past the monumentally wrong-headed decision by that school to get rid of women's basketball following the 1989-90 season because it was considered not worth the expense since "no one cared."
When the Sooners went to the Final Four in 2002, that bleak time was revisited by the media. And certainly, OU is long, long past those days now. Yet I don't think it should be permanently tossed into the bin of "that's ancient history and not relevant anymore."
Because it's one of the great lessons in women's collegiate basketball: How the right people dedicated to the right thing can make something great out of what literally -- for eight days -- had ceased to exist.
If you're familiar with the story, you know that OU's attendance was next-to-nothing -- even by the worst of women's hoops standards -- and the governor made his remark about how maybe the players could sell cookies to keep the team and how the reaction by a significant portion of OU alumni was, "Where are we eating after the spring football game?"
However, plenty of people did realize the decision couldn't have made less sense for many reasons -- not the least of which was that Oklahoma was then and still is home to so many good girls' basketball players. To even consider taking away the Division I women's basketball program from the state's signature university -- no offense to Oklahoma State or Tulsa or anybody else -- was unbelievable.
Consider these Oklahoma kids who graduated from high school in the 1989-92 time period and went onto collegiate success: Stephanie Bloomer (Arkansas '95), Andrea Harmon (Iowa '94), Shelley Jarrard (Vanderbilt '93), Katura "Tootie" Jones (Notre Dame '94) and Crystal Robinson (Southeast Oklahoma State '96). Harmon and Jarrard competed in the same Final Four, in 1993. Robinson is still playing in the WNBA.
This is not to say that had OU had its act together in those days, any of those players -- or others I haven't listed or Hansmeyer, who graduated from high school in 1996 -- would have ended up as Sooners. But the odds almost certainly would have been better.
Even as it was, Oklahoma kids from that time period, such as Angi Guffy, Etta Maytubby and Mandy Wade did come play for the Sooners. All of them scored more than 1,000 points in their careers.
The ultimate point is, Oklahoma has a long tradition of girls' and women's basketball, including the six-on-six kind that was being played in states such as Oklahoma, Iowa and Tennessee in times when girls in most states had virtually no organized basketball opportunities. The idea of OU dropping women's basketball was beyond absurd.
Yet it happened -- until a ruckus was made in the following week-plus to make school officials realize they had to do a quick resurrection.
Hansmeyer was just a 12-year-old kid then, and didn't entirely grasp the situation. But she did have some understanding of what took place.
"I think a lot of people in Oklahoma were devastated, but the fight that they undertook to keep it was incredible," Hansmeyer said. "It's amazing thinking that was the case then -- and look at it now."
Hansmeyer became an "adopted" member of the Nutmeg State when she was at UConn, and Huskies fans never forget their girls. But at heart, Hansmeyer belongs to her home state, Oklahoma. She's a native -- so are Coale and assistant coach Jan Ross and players Erin Higgins, Britney Brown, Laura Andrews, Kendra Moore and Carolyn Winchester.
They're also very happy to have Texans Leah Rush, Chelsi Welch and Antoinette Wadsworth, New Mexico's Beky Preston and, of course, those twins from California: Courtney and Ashley Paris.
Hansmeyer was a major factor in recruiting the Paris sisters, who say they've found Oklahoma an easy place to feel like home. To those for whom it truly is "home," these are the best of days.
At the Big 12 tournament in Dallas, Hansmeyer looked around Reunion Arena and thought about what it is to be a part of this Sooners team now.
"One thing that I love so much -- when I looked up in the stands, there were a lot of my old high school teammates and former OU players, and friends and family," she said. "That's what makes it so special."
Mechelle Voepel of The Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. She can be reached at mvoepel123@yahoo.com.